domingo, 6 de abril de 2008

There's been already a couple of times that some of my VMs got screwed up somehow to the point that it was no longer bootable due to some corruption or bug in the VM configuration file or the virtual disk images, so I had to start installing and updating from scratch again. This has lead me to procure an easy method to keep a current and working backup of my VMs. For that task I have setup a handy free program from Microsoft called SyncToy to do a backup of my VMs disks and configuration files upon just on click. That's the same program I use to backup the music directory from my cellphone.

Today, the Windows shares I had set up and actually used in my VMs refused to mount. I checked for some error output by mounting one of the shares from a console, copying the command line used in the script I run to mount them automatically when the Gnome session starts:

sudo mount -t vboxsf Music /mnt/Music

That produced a "Protocol error". So I researched that a bit and found the solution: in the command line the name of the shares must be spelled fully in lower case, thus:

sudo mount -t vboxsf music /mnt/Music

In the VM's shares setup window, the name of the share could be "Music" or even "mUsIc".

I found that my Linux guest was showing the time set to one hour less than my host, and no matter if I adjusted it manually, as soon as I closed the time adjustment window, the guest time was set one hour back again.

The cause of this, turns out to be that VirtualBox does not look for the host time as it was manually adjusted and currently displayed in the system tray but it monitors the time zone setting.